Forty years of field knowledge, answerable from the truck

The utility's crews inherited a knowledge problem measured in retirements: inspection histories, switching procedures, and equipment quirks lived partly in the work-order system, partly in scanned binders, and substantially in the memory of foremen leaving at a rate of a dozen a year.

The same fragmentation taxed the regulatory side. Rate-case teams spent analyst-months reassembling asset histories scattered across GIS, work orders, and inspection archives — three systems describing the same transformer three different ways.

Scoping rode along with crews and sat with the rate-case team. The common failure wasn't missing data; it was that no system knew which records described the same asset. We proposed the unglamorous fix first: an asset-matching layer across GIS, work orders, and inspections, built and validated before any interface.

Acceptance criteria were signed for both audiences: crews get answers with the source document cited and retrievable, and the rate-case team gets asset histories exportable in the format its filings already use. Answers without citations fail the criteria by definition.

The system resolves each physical asset to a single identity across the three record systems, then makes the merged history queryable in plain language from a laptop or the truck: what the last three crews found, what was replaced, which procedures apply.

Every answer carries its citations — the inspection report, the work order, the manual page — so a lineman can verify before acting and a regulatory analyst can drop the source directly into a filing exhibit.

Crews report 40% less time locating asset records, and the most recent rate case assembled six weeks faster than the prior cycle, with exhibits traced to source systems instead of rebuilt from them.

Onboarding changed shape: new linemen query the circuit's history instead of phoning whoever might remember it. The asset-matching layer now feeds the utility's reliability analytics under managed operations.